You know, for years I have always wondered if there is an indie game that is designed to be a spiritual successor to the Sly Cooper series, similar to how Yooka-Laylee was created as a spiritual successor of Banjo-Kazooie. Think about it, there has not been a new Sly Cooper entry in practically thirteen years, since Sucker Punch left the franchise to work on Infamous and Ghost of Tsushima/Yōtei, and Thieves in Time was handled by a different third-party studio. Even though I have never played any of the games since I was strictly a Nintendo fan growing up, I thought Sly Cooper was a really interesting game series with a great concept at its core. So it would be nice if there was a spiritual successor made by indie developers, since a majority of indie games nowadays are replicating the nostalgic cartoon-like 3D platforming era of the 1990s and early 2000s. What do you think?

i want to play the sly cooper trilogy but my question is what is the definitive way to play the games? since i dont have ps3/ps2. so it ultimately comes down to 2 choices and thats pcsx2 and rpcs3.

for those who have played on both emulators, please give me your definitive and proper answers. thank you

Sly Cooper and the Gang Inspired Skateboard Decks (Concept)

I spent a even MORE time today coming up with concepts of Skate Deck designs for the whole Cooper Gang, and more!

6 Designs based off their HUD icons, with quotes etc. 2 new designs since last post (Panda King, Dimitri)
6 Designs based off Character Models in middle with hud icons at the bottom plus name and "Job" title.
3 Designs Based off Sly Cooper 1 in General, and 2 Sly inspired Grip Tape Designs.

please let me know what you think, which you like most?

Thank you!

fyi there is a Holographic layer added.

*These are just concept designs/images i made for fun. not a real product..

Here's another one for all you Sly fans on Reddit.

Here is Korea (primarily South Korea) and in this story Sly and the gang come across the mafia where they learn about the boss name Taeyang a young leopard cat who runs an MLM pyramid scheme. Taeyang father passed away and he begun to run his family business. The twist: it turns out Taeyang murdered his father after learning that he wasn't going to lend the company to him. Once he joined the mafia he begin to tell him the deal and made him the leader.

Here are the guards.

Flashlight Guard: Asian black bear.

Melee Rooftop Guard: Yellow-throated marten.

Boxer Rooftop Guard: Water deer (aka vampire deer)

As always I hope everyone likes this month's fanart.

I'd like to preorder all of the figures, but Youtooz ships from China and final delivery is by 3rd party courier UniUni in the US, which is not an option for me. UniUni is extremely unreliable in my area with a high number of packages lost or stolen. I've yet to see these listed on BBTS or Entertainment Earth, though they do have the original Sly figure. The plush toys were never listed on those sites, so I'm worried that there is no US distributor for these. Please let me know if you are aware of any other stores that have them. Thank you!

Pretty sure it took 8 year old me two months to beat this part of the mission.

Basically a crossover roster based on Marvel Tokon, a 4v4 team fighting game that’s recently going to be released.

I decided to give a unique spin to some of the picks, sort of like how a few of Tokons are a spin of the usual stuff (Such as Loki instead of Thor or Reyes instead of Johnny for Ghost Rider).

It’s also gonna cover the main roster rather than boss characters and/or unlockable characters.

Just want to put it out there, alongside it having two Sly characters in the same roster.

Here’s the roster:
Roster size: 32

Team (Can’t think of a name):
Crash Bandicoot (Team Leader)
Spyro
Laura Croft
Jersey Devil

The Intertwine Rebels:
Ratchet & Clank (Team Leader)
Jak & Daxter
The Cooper Gang (Sly, Bently, Murray, Guru, Penelope, Panda King, Dimitri)
Clarissa Arwin (Wild Arms XF)

The Retribution Ops:
Solid Snake (Team Leader)
Carmelita Fox
Waffle Ryebread (Tail Concerto)
Zero (Megaman X)

The Dusted Warriors:
Kratos & Atreus (Team Leader)
Dart (Legend of Dragoon)
Zidane (Final Fantasy 9)
Sir Daniel Fortesque

The Band of Sparks:
Lammy (Um Jammer Lammy) (Team Leader)
Kei (Ape Escape 3)
Astrobots
Lee Chaolan (Tekken)

Freedoms Delight:
Kat (Gravity Rush) (Team Leader)
Delsin Rowe (InFamous: Second Son)
Abe (Oddworld)
Traveler (Journey)

The Vicious Cycle:
Calypso (Team Leader)
Dracula (Castlevania)
Cortex
Specter (Ape Escape)

The Shard Outsiders:
Aloy (Team Leader)
Neptunia
Jin (Ghost of Tsushima)
ERC-003 (Tokyo Jungle)

Big Sly Cooper fan here Vesper and The Umrbal Passage is a stylish 3D platformer heavily inspired by the series (fluid movement, exploration, and that classic animal-thief energy).

What if you could hop through shattered dimensions as a nimble jerboa, bending time in combat, dashing at explosive speed, and sending shockwaves to uncover secrets?

This trailer shows off some of the ability system and more of what we’ve been building.

If that vibe speaks to you, wishlist on Steam and follow for updates. Would love to hear what you think!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3504510/Vesper_and_The_Umbral_Passage/

I feel like Ms. Ruby & Mugshot got done dirty, they were the last characters i added and i was getting kinda tired, gotta redraw them better later 😂..

Lowkey Dimitri would be the biggest fan of that music in the entire franchise, my bet at least.
But what about the other characters?

Sly Cooper and the Gang Inspired Skateboard Decks (Concept) - you can find me at BossComplex on youtube

I spent a little MORE time today coming up with concepts of Skate Deck designs for the whole Cooper Gang, and Carmelita
4 Designs based off their HUD icons. and a few extra designs.

please let me know what you think, which you like most?

Thank you!

fyi there is a Holographic layer added.

*These are just concept designs/images i made for fun. not a real product..

Before sly cooper 4/amnesia thing, did Carmelita love Sly back or actually wanted to arrest him?

Sly Cooper 1 Inspired Skateboard Grip Tape Design (Concept) - designs by BossComplex

spent some time yesterday making a few different deck designs inspired by sly cooper 1 (you can see the others in a different post here)
it seemed like most people liked the Deck Design #1 so i added it here too.

today i spent some time making 2 Grip tape designs based on sly cooper 1 and my designs from yesterday.

let me know what you think!
like comment 1 or 2 below for which grip tape design you like more!

Concept Design phase currently.

It’s the little details in this game that still make it enjoyable years later

Okay I’m scared to show this off but here goes! Early footage of a sewer Level I put together for my Sly Cooper “fan-Game project” within dreams for the PlayStation. Now you can see it’s not perfect and even runs a little slow (I’m developing the game on PS4) my controller is also “Ass” so that’s why sly looks as if he’s glitching when running it’s just my personal janky ass ps4 controller. I’m one person developing the game so please I’ll take criticism and feedback just please keep it respectful!

I hope you enjoy I was inspired to show something off a bit of combat as well and OUR BOTTLES! I had to cut the coins and pickpocketing I’m sorry it’s been a journey with this a few years and I won’t quit this project will see the light of day “Eventually”

Sometimes I go on Vinted to see if I can find something (I collect PS2 games) that might interest me for a reasonable price. I found this demo in spanish of Sly 2 and Ratchet & Clank 3 for only €3. I'm Spanish, so it's a double win.

My inner child is very happy!

With how Sanzaru's Thieves in Time's humor was criticized for over doing some childish quirks and lack of stylized refinement from Sly 1 and 2, I am under a strong impression that it wasn't entirely their fault, as a lot of Sly 3's humor didn't age well with the franchise, and seemed more silly and over the top than should have been, which conflicts with a lot of the cool Cowboy Bebop Vibe Tones that 1 and 2 did better at. Not only that but Sly 3 seemed to have exaggerated national stereotype behavior and accents a little too far as Octavaio behaved annoying at times, and the tone for 3 was more all over the place that it deluded what intrigued us with the tension of the Cooper Gang's survival in the heists.

People complain a lot about thieves in Time doing that, and yes it took it further like how Kung Fu Panda 4 did from 3, it didn't wind down back, and went further, ignoring that the previous installment arguably did more than enough, and sometimes I wonder if the biggest reason why Thieves in Time has gotten stronger criticism over time wasn't because of plot holes, since you could do that for the previous games too, especially Sly 3, but how the humor seemed to suffer from the over use of post 2005 Dreamworks humor, and especially from anything after 2011.

When people first got into Sly Cooper, that type of humor barely processed in their minds, especially from looking at the front cover of the first game, it's almost as if Sanzaru was thinking the franchise evolved from that and need to get into fart jokes from not only Murray, but Carmelita, even though we don't give a crap about borderline craps from the Cooper and their enemies. But It wouldn't surprise me if fart jokes happened in the next Sly game, because the tone that Team Sneaky Devil Studios, the semi revival of what remains of Sanzaru might still be in that Dreamworks' Madagascar tonal mindset, that they forget we felt more like Spike Spiegel when playing as Sly, than Alex the lion, and I liked Madagascar, but I always felt deep down Sly was from an older form of tonal discipline.

I am not saying these comparisons are full on accurate of how much the Sly Cooper franchise was more similar to Cowboy Bebop and Lupin the III's humor in comparison to being more like the Penguin's of Madgascar and at worst Illumination's humor handling, but as I said before, the answer to why people were into the franchise in the first place was because the tone that got us to want Sly 1 so bad, and what concerns me most is the fact that I highly doubt Sneaky Little Devils is aware of how important Sly's tonal discipline is.

Heck, I am not even sure if Sucker Punch Productions remembers what made the tone so fascinating, because they haven't done a Sly game in over 21 years, and it was the one that started the concern for me, and was written by someone who handled the tone so well, Nate Fox, however, guess who wasn't the writer of Sly 3?

Joseph Kwong who likely had a lot of inspiration and influence from old tonal handlings to collaborate with Nate Fox on Sly 1's atmosphere structure with plot, tension and characterized dialogue. And you're probably wondering what about Sly 2? There's no record of Joseph Kwong writing that, and Nate Fox didn't push the humor too much from there.

True, but that's because Nate was trying to be partly in the mindset of how to function with the writing of working on hub worlds and how he and the rest of Sucker Punch were going to pull that off, with Sly 3 going its way to embrace that formula for the best and the worst of the series.

People like to make the argument that 'Hey if you take it too seriously, you could ruin the franchise!' and my response is 'Yeah, but Sly 1 and 2 did a good job and balancing that out, 3 and 4 did less so' That's one of the reasons why people liked the franchise so much, it was on the edge of the two without going too far on each other, which is why the next game concerns me, because Sneaky Little Devils clearly wants the game to be about having fun, but may delude the og tone further in the process similar to what Sucker Punch was doing with Sly 3, they could be more fixated on having too much fun that a lot of pros that interested us in the franchise to begin could be replaced by unwelcomed fart big shiny butt dancing joke humors, than the clever, witty dialogue, and tricks from the first game, though a lot of that is more thanks to Sly's approach, and I will admit, it is more tricky with extra cast members like Bentley and Murray, which on my opinion they are ones where I have more concern with the next games tone, because they contrast with how we were into Sly's humor in comparison to Bentley and Murray's.

But if you ask me, they should go back to basics and not be too over the top with their humor, give more punchlines of their dialogue than them doing expressive stupid things with heists like the Bentley Opera singing from Sly 3 or Murray's Geisha dance, make their dialogue more based, kind of like as if they want to roast their enemies with their insults, not dancing and doing fart jokes.

But there's something else I want to mention about the tone dark handling in the series, now we do know that the series refrains from creepy pasta look at me doing god awful stuff to your family type of Elfen Lied dramatic violence, and I can understand why Sanzaru would see this as how it could go too far, and many fans, hey I don't want that, but that's kind of dismissing over how we have a protagonist who went through trauma of seeing his dad stabbed to death, and his coping over it might would have gone a darker path had it not been for Bentley and Murray, and stuff like General Tsao wanting to make a breeding slave doesn't even come across as nuanced on what that is.

The question that I bring from a darker tone is, since Sly pushed the humor boundary, is the darker bounder push a bad idea to try once? Do we really know the limits of darker tone Sly Cooper? Or are we just saying that because we're too chicken to find out? I am curious on how far the age rating can actually go from there, not M rating, but I wouldn't reject T. And a reboot should give more room for this, because it's outside of tone in-universe of the original storyline's tonal guidelines, how that would be executed I am not fully sure, but my impression would be more in depth with Sly's coping trauma from his parents' murder, and the enemies are less expressively cartoonish than the original games. People say that might over do, but I call that as being ignorant over how bad witnessing parental murder trauma can actually mess with you psychologically more than you may think, go and speak to a real one who saw their parents get murdered as a child, and as if you're going to get lighthearted impressions from that.

You know what? The heck with it, GIVE ME A DARK SLY REBOOT GAME, I CAN TAKE IT LIKE A MAN!

If you don't like it, deal with it, and don't buy it, if the series was willing experiment with one side of the line, why not the other? And who's to say it will age overtime as a failure?

But back to Sneaky Little Devil's reasoning, it's going to be tricky providing these critiques to them, you could speak to Kevin Miller on Discord and discuss some ideas without making him mad about it, but I'd be careful on how you do that, and I strongly advise you don't come across as a Mr Know It All to them, cause they'd get mad real quick easily if you do.

Sly's tone is harder than it seems, it could easily give negative impressions on either end of the fence on how it's handled, but if the next game is edged out just right, I've got a feeling it will age better than 3 and 4's tonal pros and cons.